Sunday October 09, 2016

Check out this star map created with data from the European Space Agency’s Gaia satellite. The cool thing is that it is being delivered via WebTorrent, so no CDN is required; the data is automatically shared by page visitors.

The starmap is presented on a single page where people can drag, zoom and pinch through the galaxy, exploring stars thousands of light-years away. "To my knowledge, this is the first realtime 3D simulation of the data from the Gaia project, though other WebGL visualizers for astronomical data have come before," Hoey tells TorrentFreak. The map features 2,026,094 stars that are all located in their correct 3D position. This is much more than the 100k star visualizer Google made based on data from Gaia’s predecessor mission Hipparcos.